In this political season of the witch, weirder things can be conjured up.

If Uke, a Republican, defies the conventional wise guys and in an April special primary outpolls seasoned GOP pols such as former South Bay Rep. Brian Bilbray, state Sen. Bill Morrow, R-Carlsbad, and former North County Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian, you can imagine a lengthy postmortem highlighted by the following morals:

The GOP's right-wing well was poisoned.

One explanation for a Uke victory would be that Randall Harold Cunningham, the disgraced Republican who made the 50th District the laughingstock of the nation, polluted the prospects of garden-variety Republican politicians who, fairly or not, evoke Washington's "Culture of Corruption." Voters wanted out of the filthy box.

Money wasn't everything, but it sure was worth something.

Uke knows that he has to spend money, lots of it, to make his name a household word and his personal story, an American dream sequence, common knowledge.

Unlike the other announced candidates, however, Uke isn't talking about getting his message out. He's already sent out an expensive mailer; his TV ads are on the airwaves. In brief, he has stolen a march on his sluggish rivals.

In this race to April, a campaign that promises to be nasty, brutish and short, Uke's hoping to position himself as the natural default vote, the pro-business alternative to three GOP pols who enjoy a built-in advantage in terms of name ID.

"People will vote for the name they recognize unless they know otherwise," Uke told me in his Poway office.

Bottom line, it takes money to make people know otherwise. Uke has shown he's up to the financial challenge.

This time around, it wasn't about polish.

In person, Uke (pronounced U-KAY) comes off like a bearish professor, the rumpled antithesis of Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, a fellow businessman who oozes suavity on the campaign stump.

Uke, on the other hand, seems a balding whiz kid, a socially awkward boy genius who started Underwater Kinetics, his successful underwater photography company, out of his dorm room at UC San Diego. Issa speaks in carefully sculpted sound bites. Uke tends to lecture in a monotone. Issa is always right on point. Uke has trouble staying on message because his fertile mind won't stop working.

Losing two times wasn't the kiss of death.

In his late 30s, Uke was wealthy enough to sell his company and retire to the golf course. Instead, he ran for political office. Twice. He lost a close congressional primary in 1992 and then, to the amusement of many, he failed to submit enough valid signatures to qualify for a 1994 Assembly primary.

To this day, Uke suspects his Assembly campaign was sabotaged by a paid worker. He also believes his headquarters, his car, his campaign manager's car and his business office were broken into by political opponents. "There was a crime wave," he said, which "made me kind of paranoid."

This time, he said, he's prepared for the worst.

A Boy Scout defied the odds.

After getting his nose bloodied twice, Uke devoted the next dozen years to raising his four children, growing his business and leading a long array of civic enterprises, including the Boy Scouts and a Catholic charity. (Interesting choice for a Lutheran.)

He's best known as the prime mover behind bringing the carrier Midway to San Diego, a landmark museum on the bay, but he also developed a widely admired program to get grossly polluting vehicles off the road.

You couldn't invent a bigger Boy Scout, literally and figuratively.

The son of a Turkish-American father, Uke spent his early school years – kindergarten through second-grade – in Chiapas, Mexico. He returned to his native Los Angeles as a Spanish speaker.

"I was beat up, picked on," he recalled, the pain written in his earnest face. One time, he was forced to pronounce English words for the entertainment of his third-grade classmates. "The teacher laughed at me with the rest of the class," he said.

"Consequently, I've always been a champion of the underdog."

Aside from the self-effacing nerd label, Uke describes himself as a "Nixon-era Republican" who sees the world through an engineer's eyes. "I'm not a preacher," he said.

On the political spectrum, he puts himself to the right of fellow Del Mar resident Richard Earnest, the self-proclaimed moderate Republican candidate, and Bilbray, but well to the left of Morrow and Kaloogian.

Uke is acutely aware of the bizarre rules of the upcoming special election to decide who serves out Cunningham's '04 term. No matter what plays out in the April special primary, Uke promises to run hard in the regular June Republican '06 primary, which falls on the same day as the special runoff, almost certainly between Democratic front-runner Francine Busby and the top Republican vote-getter in the April primary.

If Bilbray, let's say, is pitted against Busby in the June runoff, Uke said he will not fold his tent and concede the '06 primary to Bilbray. In fact, Uke believes a closed Republican primary, as opposed to an open special primary, offers him a stronger chance. He also believes last-minute negative ads in the April special primary will have lost their shock value by June.

Uke's intelligence is Mensa-quality, no question. But is his mind too beautiful, too curious and inventive, for brass-knuckle, litmus-test politics in a safe Republican district? That's a nagging question.

Then again, if the few voters who turn out in April feel like thumbing their noses at prototypical GOP politicians, the unthinkable could happen.